Employment situation of women in Pakistan

Abstract

PurposeThis paper is an attempt to analyze the study of low female work participation rate in Pakistan due to the religious, traditional, cultural values, the colonial ideology and the evolution of social institution that restrain women entry into the labour market.Design/methodology/approachIn order to explore the objectives, the paper develops the classification of male and female age groups into three main categories, and analyze with the help of descriptive and mean methodology.FindingsThe findings of this paper show that the women are suffering from market discrimination and hence are pushed to separate low‐paid and low‐status jobs. Majority of women are employed in the unorganized sectors. Mostly, women are concentrated in sector known for low level of productivity, less income stability and low security of employment due to their dual role at home and workplace. Organized services sector is mostly government services, and provides employment to a small proportion of women. The rate of unemployment among women is consistently higher than that of men, both in rural and urban areas.Research limitations/implicationsThe statistics are reflective of two hard‐core realities. The first factor is that women with no education or with some basic education are allowed to work due to intensive poverty and high rate of inflation; and the second factor is that the existing socio‐cultural norms continues to strengthen gender discrimination and are a source of a massive wastage of the human capital available in the country.Practical implicationsAn analysis of structure of women employment reveals some qualitative improvement in the employment, due to high literacy rate and educational levels.Social implicationsIncreasing levels of female labour force participation rate is a poverty‐induced phenomenon; a larger part is to be traced by improvement in literacy and education levels of women. There is some qualitative improvement in the employment, as women's share in secure and better paid jobs in the organized sector appears to be higher. With the increase in educational levels of women, faster growth of women's employment is observed in modern sectors and white‐collar jobs. Government machinery, non‐governmental organizations and progressive political parties should focus on the education of women if they want to enhance the status of women in Pakistan by implementing special schemes and programmes for absorbing them into different occupations, particularly in organized sector so as to improve their structures of employment as well as status of jobs.Originality/valueClassification of male and female age groups is done into three main categories, i.e. age ten to 14, 25‐29 and 55‐59 for young, adult and old groups, respectively. This paper provides the clear picture of women problems and causes.

Women’s narratives of economic abuse and financial strategies in Britain and South Asia.

“…As the findings reported above illustrate, cultural, national and religious contexts set the parameters within which women are encouraged to define their role and worth in relation to men and elder generations. Women's education and employment opportunities, social welfare support and childcare provision all influence their economic positioning (Dale & Ahmed, 2011;Kishor & Gupta, 2009;Sadaquat & Sheikh, 2011) and so the strategies they use to respond to and/or resist economic abuse. Further, a crucial element in women's response to economic abuse is their access to statutory and South Asian women's narratives of economic abuse 25 voluntary services.…”

Intimate Partner Violence and Mental Health Effects: A Population-Based Study among Married Women in Karachi, Pakistan

“…We relied on these midwives to collect data for this study (27,28). HANDS shoulders the responsibility for health facilities in two of the towns (Gadap and Bin Qasim), and has established 10 health field sites in these towns (17,18). For this study, six of these sites were randomly chosen for data collection.…”

“…Pakistan is a low-income Muslim country with approximately 176 million inhabitants. Only 36 % of the women can read and write, and the employment rate for women is 22.2 %, as compared with an average of 77.8 % for men, with higher rates in urban areas (17,18). The Pakistani society is male dominated, and the majority of women have to accept arranged marriages; further married women have to accept a certain degree of partner violence to secure the marriage and avoid social stigma (10).…”

Women’s participations in economic and NGO activities in Bangladesh

“…The Bangladesh Home Workers Women's Association (BHWA) revealed that the estimated annual contribution of home-based workers to GDP is about TK.150 billion (Islam, 2006). Some studies have pointed out that men do not even appreciate women's household work in Bangladesh or their economic activities (Mehra, 1997;Sen, 1997;Bhatt, 1989;Efroymson et al, 2006;Sadaquat and Sheikh, 2011). In the 1961 Census, women's household work was defined as "productive economic activity" but in the 1974 Census (the First Census after independence in 1971) women's household work was defined as "housewife" (Waring, 1998).…”